Time-Life has decided to re-activate Life Magazine after a decade-long absence, and has produced a “prototype” issue with singer Norah Jones on the cover.
This is interesting, for several reasons. Now longtime readers of this blog are familiar with my feelings on Ms. Jones: I think she’s the best thing that’s happened to American pop music in recent memory- someone who, at the age of 24, has sold more albums than anyone else in the past three years despite toiling in what has recently been among the least hip of genres. Norah won nine Grammy Awards for her debut album, and more are likely to come for the follow-up- and on top of all that, she’s one of the most beautiful women in music as well.
When it comes to time to choose the Artist of the Decade, at this point it’s between Norah and Outkast. So just one quick question: Aside from the occasional obscure music periodical, why has Norah Jones never been on the cover of any magazine?
Sure, she was written about almost everywhere when “Feels Like Home” was released a few months ago. But why has the brightest young star in American music never graced the cover of Time or Newsweek, much less Entertaiment Weekly or Rolling Stone? Have the fashion lords who choose those covers cluelessly decreed Norah ‘not pretty enough” or- even more ridiculously, and thus more likely- “not thin enough’?
Oddly enough, the picture used of Jones is the exact same one from the cover of “Come Away With Me,” and is thus three years old. They must not have had much of a budget for this “prototype”; is Time Warner cutting costs again?
Posted by Stephen Silver at June 14, 2004 10:11 PM